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Welcome

TheFunded.com is an online community of over 20,000 CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs to discuss fundraising, rate and review angel investors and venture capitalists, and discuss strategies to grow a startup business. Enjoy the site, and be sure to join us at our Founder Showcase events to meet the community.

Entrepreneurs build companies and hope to make money.
Investors invest and hope to make money.
Customers buy products and hope to make money.
Advertisers advertise and hope to make money.
Employees work and hope to make money . . . . . . . . .

Using a Finder or Consultant to help you raise money is perfectly OK.

A Finder or Consultant who asks for any money upfront is not OK. If the Finder / Consultant doesn't believe in your product or service enough to base his / her compensation on the successful raising of money - then why should an investor believe in what you are doing.

The only time a Finder or Consultant should be paid is if you need extensive help with your business plan, etc. You can avoid this by creating a Board of Advisors (one of whom can help with your business plan) that would be paid in stock options down the road.

Posted by
SevenX
on 2009-02-11

[The Founding Member has suggested that this post, originally written in response to a query on the discussion board, be reposted here for broader visibility.]

No web site site can promise to find you money. Period. In fact, perhaps the best way to figure out whether a site is legitimate is the extent to which it DOESN'T promise to find you money!

Of the various possibilities out there, there are realistically four categories, in pretty much the following order:

1) Angelsoft.net: doesn't promise anything, is primarily a site that investors use themselves, doesn't expose any of your information publicly, has by far the best free search engine for legitimate early stage funding sources, and lets you prepare and send applications and videos for free directly to a limited number of screened, legitimate investment groups. If you want to pay $250 extra, you can promote your offering by posting it in a pool that 15,000+ accredited investors (and ONLY accredited investors) can browse through. They publish their stats online, and they show that between 1.3% and 5% of posted deals get funded. So your odds are between 20:1 and 75:1 against. (As Winston Churchill said about democracy: "It's the worst form of government there is...except for all the others.")

2) Vator.tv: the biggest public pitch site, legitimate, but wide open. Good news is that it's free, and that you'll likely get a lot of views of your video. On the other hand, very few of them (if any) will be from legitimate investors. Instead, you'll probably be approached by more than a few service providers, which may (or may not) be what you want, and scammers. But it's good for general exposure, and they are adding a bunch of neat new features, including micro-blogging for company updates so that interested parties can follow your corporate news. So if you're not concerned about the public nature of the site (or if you think that's a good thing), it makes sense. (Just be very, VERY wary of any "funding" leads that result from your posting.)

3) The legitimate attempts at investor matching: there are VERY few of these out there (and virtually all are not in compliance with SEC regulations) including for-profit ones (such as FundingUniverse) and not-for-profits (such as ActiveCapital (the only truly SEC-approved, legit one) and TheFunded's sponsor, IdeaCrossing). They mean well, but have few investors (usually starting from a local group or area: Utah in the case of FundingUniverse, Cleveland, Ohio for IdeaCrossing), and the for-profit ones are not cheap.

4) Everyone else: there are several dozen of these (perhaps even a hundred or more), ranging from out-and-out scams (any one in which you get an instantaneous response promising money, asking for money, or asking for financial information), to sites that function primarily as lead-generators for service providers. I don't personally know of a single company that has had a good experience with FindThatMoney, FundFinder, GoBigNetwork, RaiseCapital, Go4Funding, etc. etc. etc.

The bottom line is that raising capital is very, very (did I say VERY?) tough, particularly in this economy, and only a teeny, tiny fraction of companies will EVER get outside equity financing. The stats suggest that's something like 0.25% for venture money, and 1-2% for angel money.
So anyone who promises you quick and easy money is either well-meaning-but-delusional (the rare exception) or a scumbag-with-a-hand-heading-to-your-pocket (the vast majority.) As a first pass heuristic, if an "angel group" is not listed on either the Angel Capital Association web site (http://www.angelcapitalassociation.or...) or the Angelsoft Group Finder (http://angelsoft.net/entrepreneurs/an...) you should be extremely wary of any claims they make...but then, of course, you would be anyway. Right? Right??

Remember the immortal words of Robert A. Heinlein: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

Posted by
daithic
on 2007-09-06

I wanted to agree with the great suggestion of Gronk - it would be great to see a similar site rating Investment bankers. My experience is they are not a value add to the funding process in general but it would be refreshing to hear if anyone has had a good experience.
The other element to this is people's experience in using advisers, i.e., who are the good ones out there.

One of my board directors proposed to help us fundraise using his influence in the VC community. He suggested a 3% finder's fee with a few stock options on top for funds raised through his introduction. I understand the typical finder's fee for investment bankers is in the range of 6% to 7%. Is my board director's proposal reasonable?